Overcrowded agenda: Texas needs more immigration judges, a sharpening of ICE mission, help with costs.

Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Published
5:30 am CDT, Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The picture of badly overcrowded local immigration courtrooms drawn by Chronicle reporter Susan Carroll this week makes the case convincingly: More federal immigration judges are needed here and nationwide to ease these conditions of crowding that are delaying justice and probably permitting increasing numbers of “bad guys” to get lost in the throngs.

Yesterday, President Barack Obama signed the 2009 budget. Somewhere in the ocean of bailout dollars, that document also contains a drop — an additional $5 million — to fund more immigration judges. When that money comes, much of it should be forwarded posthaste to Texas, and specifically, to Houston.

Since 2002, Texas has been granted only one additional immigration judge, bringing the statewide total to 23. Meanwhile, case loads have risen roughly 40 percent over the same period. Small wonder that delays are the rule for hapless defendants and overtaxed staff and judges.

Part of this problem evidently arises from the roundly and rightly criticized Bush administration policies of making judicial candidates pass an ideological litmus test. During the latter years of the Bush administration, appointments slowed to a trickle.

Presumably, the advent of the Obama administration means those problems can be put behind us. Ideological preference has no place in an immigration courtroom and the new administration appears to understand that.

But the mess won’t be fixed just by adding a few more federal dollars to seat a few more immigration judges in Texas. The unclogging must extend beyond the courtroom to some root causes in the field, beginning with a more careful focusing of the activities of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement program.

ICE’s charter mission was to target the most dangerous immigrant fugitives and bring them to justice, but the program appears to have lost some of its focus in recent times — if it has ever truly had such a focus.

Research by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, found that ICE has rounded up mostly non-criminals over the past few years. Using ICE’s own statistics, the think tank concluded that 48 percent of ICE arrests involved immigrants with no criminal records and another 34 percent were arrested on the mere suspicion of being here illegally. That means only one in five caught by ICE can be categorized as a true “bad guy.”

Clearly, that is moving far afield of the original ICE mission. And it does so in a way that threatens to overwhelm the immigration court system with defendants who may indeed be guilty of an illegal act — crossing the border without documentation — but who are not likely to pose risks for violent criminal behavior. With the situation in Mexico and along the Texas border deteriorating into one of chaos and violence related to drug trafficking, that record is unacceptable. In fact, it’s downright dangerous to public safety. It appears that more targeted work by ICE could contribute significantly to clearing up the clogged immigration courtrooms here. ICE should do so.

The work of the Department of Homeland Security appears to be contributing to a separate problem that merits a close look, too. Immigration violations are a federal matter, but DHS work along the border has inadvertently clogged up state district courts with non-immigration offenses such as Social Security fraud and drug offenses, according to a Brookings Institution study, “Immigration and the Courts, Brookings Governance Studies Judicial Issues Forum.” Implementation of federal policy thus results in additional costs borne by Texas taxpayers. Those costs shouldn’t belong to us alone.

Bottom line for Texans? We need more money for more immigration judges; a sharpening of focus on ICE’s part to zero in on the real “bad guys”; and help with costs that fall on state taxpayers disproportionately as the result of the implementation of federal policy.